Behaviours analysis of the Social marketing Case – ‘Like a girl’ Student of Master in Strategic Public Relations University of Sydney October 2018

Behaviours analysis of the Social marketing Case – ‘Like a girl’ Student of Master in Strategic Public Relations University of Sydney October 2018

Behaviours analysis of the Social marketing
Case – ‘Like a girl’

Student of Master in Strategic Public Relations
University of Sydney
October 2018
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Introduction
International Social Marketing Association described the definition of social marketing as (2013) ‘Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviours that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good.’ (p. 1). ‘Like a girl’ campaign is deserved to be a social marketing campaign because of its objectives and achievements. ‘Like a girl’ campaign was implemented by Always Company with the target group from 16 to 24 year-old young girls, because the phrase of ‘like a girl’ has a huge negative impact on girls’ self-confidence throughout the puberty. This campaign was aimed at changing young girls’ unconfident behaviours, people’s negative attitudes to young girls and people’s behaviour of insulting girls through the way of reshaping the meaning and interpretation of ‘like a girl’. A study result showed the advocacy video had been viewed more than 90 million times and achieved great success on reshaping the meaning of ‘like a girl’ in publics and changing young girls’ unconfident behaviors (Campaign, 2015).This short essay will focus on exploring young girls’ behaviours analysis in this social marketing campaign by applying the benchmark of Behaviour.
Benchmark of Behaviour
According to French and Blair-Stevens (2007), the benchmark of behaviour is not just focus on information, knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, but more focus on a robust behaviour analysis including the problems of current behaviours and the desired behaviours. Specific actionable and measurable behavioural goals need to be set, which is the social good in a campaign. Besides, behavioural intervention includes four key elements, which are educating or encouraging, servicing, designing and controlling. The below will analyze the behaviours of young girls in ‘Like a girl’ campaign by following these guidance.
Behaviours analysis
French and Blair-Stevens (2007) clarified that analyzing audience’s attitudes, desires and motivations is the staring way of understanding behaviours. After focusing on individuals, the wider social and environmental context should be explored that determines to be an effective social marketing. Thus, the behaviours of young girls will be analyzed from personal awareness and social circumstances, which strongly affects young girls’ behaviours. Campaign (2015) pointed that the self-esteem of girls would fall down twice as much than boys’ during puberty. This kind of personal attitude and awareness explains why young girls lose their confidence. Furthermore, the deep reason is gender stereotype for young womanhood constructed by social cultures and contexts, such as beauty, submissiveness, power and strength for man rather than women. Always (2018) also stated that young girls have no really picnic either since the rest of puberty because of the hard knock of insulting adolescent girls. These factors cause that young girls behave as no confidence in society, and these social stereotype also reinforce the action of discrimination to young girls, like insulting. As the advocacy video shown (Always, 2015), young girls, men and boy run, fight and throw unconfidently, which is caused by the bondage of social stereotype. Contagious (2015) also argued that younger children run and fight furiously and freely, while the older people flap their limbs lightly. Publics thought the meanings of running like a girl were slow, unconfident, weak and feeble. More seriously, the boy in the video said he had ever insulted girls. This unrespect action can be called as gender discrimination that is also caused by negative stereotype.
On the contrary, the girl child in 10 years old run as normal and confident way, because she believed that the meanings of running like a girl were running strongly with power, and running as fast as you can (Campaign, 2015). These contrast behaviours between prepubescent girls and other people indicates two main problems. For the publics, the problems are holding on social stereotype to young girls and insulting them with discrimination. As for young girls, the problem is behaving unconfidently due to personal awareness and social circumstance.
As the above analysis of behaviours problems, social stereotype for young girls is the key factor, which has huge effects on people’s perception and young girls’ behaviours. ‘Like a girl’ social campaign planned to reshape the understandings of ‘like a girl’ of publics, through the way of which the young girls’ behaviours can be changed. The desired behaviours of young girls are do themselves confidently in the society as what the girl child did. Apart from changing young girls’ unconfident behaviours, this social campaign was also aimed to changing the behaviours of public people, for instance, no discrimination to young girls, stop insulting girls.
The way of influencing behaviours
French and Blair-Stevens (2007) explained that educating, servicing, designing and controlling are the four primary components to influence behaviours. Educating means informing and persuading publics with knowledge to build awareness. In this case, educating is the major tool used to affect and change people’s behaviours. Showing the contrast behaviours in that advocacy video is aimed to inform publics and young girls that running as fast as you can is the real meaning of ‘like a girl’. This video attempted to inform the new meaning to publics and persuade to change young girls’ unconfident behaviour. In addition to spread this video information and value from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, they adopted the hashtag #LikeAGirl to encourage women to share their amazing things (Campaign, 2015). Building an online talk public area by using Twitter can be seen as the intervention from the element of supporting. Reshaping the meaning of ‘like a girl’ by building and articulating discourse on media dramatically changed the behaviour of young girls and publics’ image to young girls. As a result, this video acquired 213 thousand likes on YouTube and the hashtag #LikeaGirl was tagged in over 40,000 tweets. After watched this video, 76% of women aged from 16 to 24 said that they no longer thought ‘like a girl’ as derogatory towards women and girls. Two third of men believed this video changed their view of negative stereotype to women and girls (Sites, 2015). That result demonstrates that this campaign successfully changed public opinion and view to girls.
Conclusion
Behaviours analysis is one of the factors that result in the success of ‘Like a Girl’ social campaign. This campaign not only focus on the behaviours of young girls, but also pay attention to the deep reasons which are rooted in personal attitudes and social context. Moreover, ‘Like a girl’ campaign used the suitable influence strategy by educating and persuading publics and young girls. However, this campaign applied few primary element to influence behaviours, for instance it was failed to using designing and controlling elements to affect young girls’ behaviours and public awareness. All in all, ‘Like a girl’ social campaign successfully applied the majority elements of behaviour benchmark, but the four key influencing elements need to be further developed.
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